Why Labour can't counter the Greens' popularity with green policies

This week, we have learnt that the Greens are now a bigger party than Ukip. Their membership rocketed up 2,000 overnight to reach 43,829. We already know that Labour, in response to the surge in support and membership of the small left-wing party over the past few months, has set up an anti-Green unit under shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan in an attempt to counter the threat to its votes from Natalie Bennett's troops.

What we've also learnt this week is that the Prime Minister sees the Greens as such an important potential threat to his rivals that he has refused to take part in the leaders' televised debates unless Bennett is also included.

And news has broken today of Tory MPs' plans to split Labour's vote by encouraging left-wing voters in their constituencies to support the Greens, who are aiming to run in 75 per cent of seats this election.

However, one thing that has fallen under the radar, under all this political greenery, is Ed Miliband's launch of something called "action/2015" yesterday at a London school. There, he commited the next Labour government to seeking to "raise global ambitions for combating extreme poverty, inequality and climate change".

Here's what he promised on the latter subject:

In 2015, after the General Election here, the countries of the world will come together to agree two plans.

The first plan aims to eradicate poverty over the next fifteen years. And the second will tackle climate change.

These two plans affect all of us: everyone in this room, everyone across the world, and especially, everyone in your generation because they will help determine the world you will live in.

They matter. And what the British government does at these conferences – what it does in your name - matters too.

I know tackling climate change, global poverty and inequality are not as fashionable as they once were. But I also know they are more important than ever.

For me, they are not luxury items in our programme for change. They are not part of a branding exercise. They go to the heart of my beliefs and the reason why I entered politics.

This is about ensuring the next generation can do better than the last in this country and around the world . . .

The progress of the last 15 years in the tackling poverty, improving health, on food security and access to sanitation could all be eroded if global temperatures are allowed to soar. I believe tackling climate change is the most important thing I can do in politics for my children’s generation. It demands leadership and resolve.

So in Paris next year, a Labour government would be pushing for global targets for reducing carbon emissions that rise every five years with regular reviews towards the long-term goal of what the science now tells us is necessary – zero net global emissions in the latter half of this century.

All admirable promises, and from a man who was the first ever Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. However, his green policy proposals will not help him counter the threat to his party's support from the Greens. This is due to three reasons:

It's not as "fashionable"

Miliband's own acknowledgement that climate change is not a "fashionable" subject is truer than maybe even he realises. The Labour leader was referring to David Cameron's 2005 rebrand of the Tories – hugging huskies and generally making his green credentials central to his image as Tory leader – and how it was all really a hollow "branding exercise".

However, green policy is no longer top of the agenda due to a number of reasons. Chiefly, economic realities have pushed it down the list of spending priorities. And it seems even the Greens have accepted this. They are no longer supported simply because they are the party of eco-friendly policies. Like the other parties, the Greens have been concentrating far more on economic policies in this parliament. However, their economic policies are formulated to tackle inequality and challenge austerity – free education, scrapping the welfare cap, reducing the pay gap, and turning the minimum wage into a living wage, for example. People are voting Green because the party provides a radical alternative to the economic policies, and consensus on the need for further austerity, of the Conservatives and Labour.

Playing on enemy turf

A little like the Tory leadership having to speak more than they'd like about EU membership and immigration, in an ill-advised attempt to shoot Ukip's fox, Labour talking about the environment is playing on the Greens' turf. Voters whose main priorities concern the environment are unlikely to vote for Miliband's handful of green proposals, emphasised almost as an afterthought a few months before the general election, when there is another party that historically has dedicated itself to environmentally-friendly policies.

Picking the wrong battle

There is a way for Labour to combat the Greens' popularity, but the environment isn't it. As I have reported before, the best rhetoric Labour can use is to emphasise the costly, predominantly middle-class nature of the "green lifestyle". Key figures in the Green Party admit that this is an area where it needs to improve, trying to broaden the appeal of living sustainably beyond the narrow section of society that can afford to do so. One of Miliband's aides revealed to my colleague, Tim, that this is Labour's best bet against the Greens, commenting: “We’ve found the best line of attack is to attack the Greens as an upper-middle class lifestyle choice.” There hasn't been much evidence of the party publicly using this attack line, but it would serve it well, and would be more effective than hoping a few green pledges will do the trick.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.